OPINION:
Today we celebrate Memorial Day, the civic holy day we set aside to commemorate those who died fighting our wars. It is a day for somber reflection of the sacrifice offered to their fellow Americans by more than a million men over the course of this nation’s history.
This commemoration began on June 3, 1861, when the recently dug grave of John Quincy Marr — a captain in the Virginia militia and the first combat fatality in the War between the States — was decorated in Warrenton, Virginia. Marr had been killed two days earlier at the Battle of Fairfax Courthouse.
The practice of decorating the graves of their honored war dead would soon sweep both North and South. While many have claimed to be the first to observe Decoration Day, the National Cemetery Administration, a division of the Department of Veterans Affairs, credits Mary Ann Williams with originating the idea of decorating the graves of our military men with flowers.
Mrs. Williams — like millions of others — suffered greatly in the War Between the States. Her husband led Confederate troops in Virginia and ultimately returned to Columbus, Georgia, where he died in February 1862. She visited her husband’s grave frequently and, along with her daughter, decorated other soldiers’ graves with flowers.
The enthusiasm for honoring our war dead was widespread, and a generation after the Civil War, almost every state had adopted Decoration Day. Memorial Day finally became a federal holiday in 1971.
It is altogether fitting that we remember those who died on behalf of the nation. It is also fitting that we are conscious of the fact that the wars in which they died — and American involvement in those wars — were not predestined by God. They were the consequence of choices made by American citizens and their leaders.
The Civil War — the unhappy impetus behind Decoration Day — was, without a doubt, the single greatest public policy failure in American history. Every other nation in this hemisphere, from Canada to Argentina, freed its slaves in the first half of the 19th century, and none of them required bloodshed to do so.
Solid arguments can be made — and were made at the time — that we either bumbled or were managed into World War I, and that our involvement in World War II resulted directly from President Franklin Roosevelt’s aggressive trade embargo on the Empire of Japan. Toward the end of that war, Roosevelt made it clear to our allies (which included the murderous and rapacious Soviet Union) that we would tolerate Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, which is especially odd, given that the stated purpose of the war in Europe was to prevent the Germans from setting up precisely such a regime in the middle of the continent.
In Korea and Vietnam, American foreign policy elites and the officer corps seemed largely indifferent to victory. Americans gave their lives in Korea to solidify what was supposed to be a temporary border between the south and the north. In Vietnam, the elites’ accelerating moral corrosion and the office corps’ unwillingness to alert the public to that corrosion led to absolute defeat. Both wars were dramatic failures of our political leadership.
Those who died in Korea and Vietnam — and later in Iraq and Afghanistan — would rather have remained alive. Or, if their lot was to die, they would have preferred to die in a victorious effort.
American soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen have always been exemplary in their courage, bravery, and willingness to sacrifice, from the men who crossed the Delaware with Washington that Christmas in 1776 to the daring and skill routinely displayed by our armed forces today all over the world.
Our political leadership’s skill and prudential capacity have always been much less certain.
The real lesson of Memorial Day is not that the United States has been gifted with brave and capable soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen — the American warrior is unmatched in the history of the world. The real lesson is that American citizens need to exercise much greater care and forethought before we allow our political leaders to send our warriors into harm’s way.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times and a co-host of the podcast “The Unregulated.”
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